Days of the Discoverers eBook

I was the Serpent, the Sacred
Snake—­
Wolf, bear and
fox
By the silent shores of river
and lake
Tread softly, listening lest
they wake
My voice that
mocks
The rattle that falling bones
will make
On barren rocks.

My banded skin is the voice
of the Priest—­
I am the Drum!
I sound the call to the War-God’s
feast
Till Tezcatlipoca’s
power hath ceased
And the White
Gods come
Out of the fire of the burning
East—­
Hear me, the Drum!

X

THE GODS OF TAXMAR

If the Fathers of the Church had ever been on the
other side of the world, they would have made new
rules for it.

So thought Jeronimo Aguilar, on board a caravel plying
between Darien and Hispaniola. It was a thought
he would hardly have dared think in Spain.

He was a dark thin young friar from the mountains
near Seville. In 1488 his mother, waiting, as
women must, for news from the wars, vowed that if
God and the Most Catholic Sovereigns drove out the
Moors and sent her husband home to her, she would
give her infant son to the Church. That was twenty-four
years ago, and never had the power of the Church been
so great as it now was. When the young Fray Jeronimo
had been moved by fiery missionary preaching to give
himself to the work among the Indians, his mother
wept with astonishment and pride.

But the Indies he found were not the Indies he had
heard of. Men who sailed from Cadiz valiant if
rough and hard-bitted soldiers of the Cross, turned
into cruel adventurers greedy for gold, hard masters
abusing their power. The innocent wild people
of Colon’s island Eden were charged by the planters
with treachery, theft, murderous conspiracy, and utter
laziness. With a little bitter smile Aguilar
remembered how the hidalgo, who would not dig to save
his life, railed at the Indian who died of the work
he had never learned to do. It was not for a
priest to oppose the policy of the Church and the Crown,
and very few priests attempted it, whatever cruelty
they might see. Aguilar half imagined that the
demon gods of the heathen were battling against the
invading apostles of the Cross, poisoning their hearts
and defeating their aims. It was all like an
evil enchantment.

These meditations were ended by a mighty buffet of
wind that smote the caravel and sent it flying northwest.
Ourakan was abroad, the Carib god of the hurricane,
and no one could think of anything thereafter but the
heaving, tumbling wilderness of black waves and howling
tempest and hissing spray. Valdivia, regidor
of Darien, had been sent to Hispaniola by Balboa,
the governor, with important letters and a rich tribute
of gold, to get supplies and reinforcements for the
colony. Shipwreck would be disastrous to Balboa
and his people as well as to the voyagers.